Shamanism is a dimension of human experience that can be found in every culture in any age.It can be observed in a variety of forms, ranging from a fundamental spontaneous experience, derivative culturally shared practices, or as veiled motifs of spiritual, medical, artistic, scientific, and psychotherapeutic interventions.

Paradoxically, as shamanism becomes more culturally shared, it may become less authentic—less culturally challenging—and degenerative.Provoked by an experience of everyday life as a sort of “half-truth,” shamanism is a method that focuses on the erroneous belief in a separation of human life from nature.Shamanism focuses specifically on remaining alert to the creatural dimensions of human life that can be overridden by cultural, socio-psychological dimensions of everyday life.

Shamanism is an expression of an enduring wild state to remain alert to the changing conditions of existence and integrate into the natural world that continues to design and express human life across the long run.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Trees In Their Humanness

Copyright Lance
Kinseth, 2011

…the fathomless
gaze of all animals when they acknowledge us

as being at one with them.

James Cowan, Letters
From A Wild State

THE GAZE OF ANIMALS toward us acknowledges us as other
animals rather than as something separate and above.But
when we return the gaze, the humanness, for example, of trees can seem to be
such a disparate view for us, as if humanness is ours alone.A phrase, such as Trees in
their humanness [Lisel Mueller, from
“Necessities,” Alive Together]
may read as an oxymoron, as impossible.

Far more disparate than finding our humanness in trees,
going even deeper, there is this very real way that

We walk about in
the footsteps of birds.

We sit down as
pools of rain

And we stand up as
uncoiling seeds.

There is within
you and I this moon.

There is within us
a field of grass in wind.

There is within us
the walking of ants.

There is this way that, for example, we might rationally
understand that we have been contrived from stone—star matter.But going even further, there is more
perplexing way in which

All the stones
have been us

[W. S. Merwin, from
“Eyes of Summer,”

Writings To An
Unfinished Accompaniment].

How could this be, when stone predates us; we, who are so
very young in the history of the Earth?While such views can appear to be esoteric poetic musings, the writers
intended them to be descriptive of an unseen reality.Ultimately, such statements are offered because they are
felt to be deeply practical and to have something important to say to us.Our inability to envision events in
such a manner might be lamentable as a measure of our limits, and perhaps even
dangerous for survival across the long run of things.

The effusive body of the shaman is self-as-landscape.

Humanness is more than human beings. Events that can appear
to be very distanced from us, such as rain and seed are, in fact, most
intimate, even more intimate that we are to each other.

The holy water that is rain and the seed that is grain—the
dominant forces that continue to buoy up the most advanced post-industrial,
cybernetic culture—are present daily, and are the core of our immanent
survival.Every inhalation is also
flora’s exhalation.And across the
long run of things, the flora and waters out of which grain and drink and
breath emerge continue to speak “humanely” to us with a wisdom that offers us
an optimal way forward were we to awaken to it and listen.